What young India wants from '08 Budget?

As Finance Minister P Chidambaram gets ready to present Budget 2008-09 on February 29, CNBC-TV18 gets you a sense of what young India really wants.
Faster and inclusive growth, that’s what young India and young CEOs wanted from the Finance Minister in the last Budget.
This year, the focus is on agricultural reforms, on strengthening infrastructure and R&D and widening the tax base.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram has said, “The year 2007-08, will mark the beginning of the 11th plan. The declared objective is faster and more inclusive growth. I can state with confidence that in the eve of the plan, the economy is in a stronger position then ever before, it therefore beholds us to set higher goals. The approach paper to the 11th plan states that the plan ‘will aim at putting the economy on a sustainable growth trajectory, with a growth rate of approximately 10%, by the end of its period.”
“The economy is set to grow as robustly, as it will, it’ll take a heavy toll on the environment in both, the way goods are created and goods are used. I hope that in this budget or in the subsequent one, the finance minister will bring in this aspect as to how we protect our environment as we grow, because ultimately it’s supposed to be about quality of life,” Rajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto, said.
Making his wish list Rajiv Memani, Country Managing Partner, E&Y India, said, “Reducing the custom duty would be the biggest step and that’s what he will try and target through the Budget.”
Anuj Gupta, CEO, Final Quadrant Solutions, is of the view, “Some system of access to information, that’s been the key success factor to the developed parts of the world. People are spreading on more information than we are and I think that’s some thing that the government should look at.”
Vivek Agarwal, CEO, Liqvid, said, “There is an example that I read, Bhutan for improving the public system of education, made it compulsory for all bureaucrats and ministers to send their children to the government schools where they were actually being run.”
ID Musafir, Director, M & B Footwear, believes, “The divide between the haves and the have-nots is going to increase, so unless you provide basic employment to the masses of India, and learn from examples like China, where everything co-exists, I think this is what the Finance Minister should look at.”
Farzana Haque, Head- Retail & CPG Group, TCS, said, “We are looking at India as a manufacturing hub for small cars, we are looking at semi-conductors, so there are some industries that need their incentive.”
From a population of 1.2 billion in India, only 35% have access to healthcare, in fact the government has made health care one of its top priorities.
With the beginning of the 11th five-year plan, the budget allocation for health and family welfare has been increased by 21.9% to Rs 15,291 crore, but this is just still 0.9% of the GDP, the focus of the government has been on providing primary rural health care through national rural healthcare missions.
But as the middle class in India grows, an increasing number of people are turning to private healthcare providers.
The number one demand of private healthcare players is that the government recognize their contribution without treating them as charities. To get a sense of the prescription to growth, we met one of the prominent names in the Indian healthcare market.
Shivender Mohan Singh, CEO and MD, Fortis Healthcare, who said, “From this year’s budget, I expect the team to put health of the nation to the wealth of the nation and give healthcare, the much required infrastructure status.”
Fortis Healthcare, a Ranbaxy group company, was incorporated in the year 1996. It has 13 hospitals across six states in North India, including cardiac and cancer specialty centers.
Leading the company forward is Shivender Mohan Singh, CEO and MD. He is now looking forward to growing Fortis’s network.
“The focus is going at west and south and also over the next two years, we will be looking at it rationally, though that’s not the major focus, that would be more opportunistic and more strategic. But the strategy of the company going forward in the next 3-4 years is to set up facilities on a national level, so we are looking at expanding our north India footprint, to replicate that in the west and the south and after that, in the east,” he said.
Fortis, now in its 7th year has created super specialty centers across the country. Starting with cardiac care centers, today Fortis Hospitals are multi-specialty facilities that use state of the art technology. But even with the ever-growing number of private health centers around the country, it hasn’t been given an industry status as demanded, so what is the biggest drawback?
“What the government has to do is to stop looking at private healthcare organizations to solve their problems. There was a lot of expectation and talks in the last 4-5 years that whatever the government has not been able to do for access to healthcare, it’s now become the private player’s responsibility or an expectation that the private players will do that. If you expect private hospitals to start giving treatments for free to a percentage of population or a certain level of population, that’s not going to happen because private players are not here to do charity or to government’s job, but we can certainly work together, Singh said.
“There is a lot of scope for the partnership where whatever agenda the government has, they can channel private players to work together and certainly capacity building is not difficult for a private organization to do as long as they see some benefits in that. So there is a lot of scope to work together but I think the approach has to be more collaborative.”
The health care sector for the coming budget hopes that annual poll for incentivising research and annual development will be heard. The sector is also hoping for tax benefits in order to enhance health care service delivery. So how could all of this be achieved?
“Health care is fundamental, the social sectors like health and education are the foundations of any developing country. We don’t have any such incentive in the industry, so I think infrastructure status study comes out as number one, second is that the time now for the health care industries to be give NA status. We have been running as a healthcare sector for long enough and it is required to give it a focus as an industry and therefore give healthcare an industry status,” he added.
“The third and final one to my mind is something we have talked a lot about, but very little has come out of that, is actually giving a separate license for health insurance and promoting players to get into health insurance and therefore have a third party player model for patients to get insured and get covered. Today 80% of health care in India is out of pocket which is pretty significant in terms for an cost for an individual at an episode if something is going to happen to a member of his family, but if there is an insurance, obviously the bite is going to be taken away and therefore the sting is not there for payment at that point of time, the procedure gets to be done or an operation needs to be done. “
“It also will overtime, start promoting preventive health care which for our country of our size and for the healthcare environment that we have, preventive will be the significant focus going forward, so health insurance would be the third and the last one for an incentive for the sector to grow,” Singh said.